


Mira in December

by standalone



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artistic Growth, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Jobs, New Year's Eve, Teaching, holiday romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28450050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: “You know you don’t have to bring someone. It’s not a requirement for coming home.”“It’s not like I bring them all! It’s just when I really think we could have a future, you know?”“Is that what you want? A future?”“Yeah.” Isn’t it obvious? Doesn’t everyone?
Relationships: Background relationships - Relationship, Mira Citron/Florence Mejia
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Mira in December

**Author's Note:**

> I needed a little New Year's story to help ease the way out of 2020 and into our shared future. May it treat us all well.

**December 2017**

“I can’t wait for you to meet them!” I say, jamming pants into my suitcase. These earbuds really do make it so much easier to get shit done while I’m on the phone. “I know I’ve said it before, but this time, I’m pretty sure this time, this is the one.”

“Uh-huh.” 

“For real. Do you know? For dinner, the first time we went out, they took me to three different restaurants.”

“How—” 

“We had cocktails at one spot, and this weird dehydrated olive starter thing that was actually incredible.” That sweater is so great, but it just doesn’t want to fit. Fine. I’ll wear it on the plane. “And then we walked down the street to an Eritrean place, and _then_ we went to the food trucks at the plaza, where there was a band playing, and they got us hot chocolate and the best churros I have had in my entire life.—Hey, how many shoes is a foolish number of shoes? Am I really gonna want flats?—It’s just, with Addison, it’s just _like that_ all the time. They’re always coming up with stuff I wouldn’t have even thought.”

“And you like that. Being kept on your toes.”

“It’s great. Yeah.” Who wants to know what’s coming all the time? How extraordinarily dull! 

“It’d make me nuts.”

Of course. Who wants to know what’s coming all the time? Florence. That’s who.

“Hey, Flor, you wear earrings, right?”

“Yeah, most days.”

“But not dangly ones?”

“Right.” I can hear the smile. She knows exactly what I’m up to. 

In my workroom, I check through the line of little paperboard jewelry boxes till I find the ones I had in mind. Tiny and abstract, green cloisonné flecked with gold, they were a little sedate for the collection I was working on, and I only made the single prototype pair. I’m wearing a set from the final collection right now—each earring three asymmetrical blobs, pink, yellow, and a blazing blue, linked to each other with thin lines of hammered wire. The jewelry’s just a side business, but since I can get ten times as much for a pair of earrings as for a signed print, I’m trying to get more intentional about it. My rep says once I get a little bigger I should start a workshop, says, “It doesn’t all have to be from your own hands, Mira.” But I’m pretty sure if it’s not from my hands, it won’t count as me. 

A few days later, Florence puts the earrings in immediately upon opening the box. (Isn’t it gratifying when that happens? Like they were just waiting for your gift, like it’s made their life suddenly more complete.) With a practiced pinch at front and back, she slides each post into place and clicks the clasp on behind. She grins at me. “What do you think?”

Addison beats me to it: “It’s like they were made for you.”

The bar is crowded and buzzy with the crush of revelers, but Yvette got here a little early and staked us out a low table of our own near the fireplace, which blazes merrily beside me.

“They’re perfect,” I say. 

“Mira Citron originals,” Yvette says. I brought her some screen-printed kitchen towels. I don’t know how to get gifts for my friends’ partners, and everyone needs towels, right? (It certainly seems like it. They’ve been selling up a storm the last couple weeks.) These ones have a kind of deco leaf print with block letters in the negative space: HOPE, says the first. LOVE, says the second. The third says COOK.

I dissemble lightly. “They’re just something I’ve been playing around with. I hope you get some good use out of them.”

The firelight sparkles in the enamel of Florence’s right earring, and sets her face aglow. “Thanks,” she says to me. “You’re a treat, you know.”

“Heyo!” I object, raising my glass so we can all tap drinks. “ _You’re_ a treat, Florence Mejia.”

Yvette rolls her eyes at Addison. “Just go with it.”

Addison shrugs and goes with it, putting their cocktail back neatly. “This is great. Can I get anyone another?”

While Addison’s at the bar, Florence says, “I’m glad you were able to fit us in! Busy visit this year, huh?”

“I should have come earlier. How was I supposed to know that Addison would want to do literally every single thing in the city?”

Florence gives me a look. “Would more time have helped?”

“You’re right, no.” Today, we’ve already been to an open-air artisans’ market, a new small-plates restaurant, a self-guided walking tour of urban murals, a gallery, two bookstores, and a distillery. “We’re artists! You know, you need to see things. For inspiration.” Addison’s world is a dazzle of innovation. It’s the environment in which every artist ought to live.

“Constantly,” Yvette says dryly. “Neverending newness.”

“That’s not—” My powers of reasoning are inadequate in this moment. The fir garlands and the fire and the warmth of whiskey and the high tinkling strains of Christmas music over the chatter of the crowd all overwhelm me, and I just smile and shake my head. “What are you gonna do? I mean, there are worse problems to have.”

“Have you spent much time with your mom and dad?”

“Not a ton.”

“I saw your mom at the store last week. She’s really proud, you know.”

My name pulls up more search results by the week. Who would’ve guessed social media posts could actually turn into art sales?

“I know! I quit most of my jobs and I can still pay my own rent! Talking of jobs, how’s ol’ Chavez High?”

“Same old. Hey, Mira, if you’re not busy tomorrow, I was thinking—”

Ferrying drinks in both hands, Addison rejoins us. “The bartender just told me about the Midnight Revels. You must know about this, right?” They glance around the three of us too quickly for verification, then rush on without it. “It sounds absolutely incredible. It’s starting in twenty minutes. I say we pound these and skedaddle.” Listening, I am once again smitten at their everlasting interest in this world in which we live. “You all with me?” 

“For sure! Bottoms up?” I look to Florence to see what she’s thinking.

She shrugs, lifting her glass toward me. “I think the question here is what do you _want_?”

That’s easy. I want to be delighted. 

Addison’s an endless spring of novelty, which is great. And when I’m with Florence, even the mundane is a joy. 

This combination? I can’t miss. 

I throw Yvette her jacket and wrap Flor’s scarf, which has slithered to the settee, back around her neck. “Let’s go!”

  
  


**December 2018**

“You were right; I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“I never said that!”

“I figured it out.” Addison is hilarious and brilliant and exhausting. Bringing them home with me, I was constantly out doing new things, showing all the parts of town I knew, exploring ones I didn’t. Everything was new, everything was fascinating, everything was so endlessly attractive that it all ran together in my mind in a giant muddled pool of beauty too broad for me to navigate.

We broke up in January, and I had to date a few very boringly attractive and kind people just to give myself a break. “And then I met Bekah, and she’s just, she’s incredible. I have never met someone so patient, so thoughtful. I just feel, well, _seen_ , you know?” Bekah’s home helping my parents and nephew make pies, so as a non-baker, I excused myself to meet up with Florence for coffee. “She’s perfect. I know it’s early, but Flor, I can see this sticking.”

“Uh-huh.” 

“Why do you always say that?”

“Come on, Mira, you’re a serial monogamist.”

“Who says?”

“You literally have a new person every year.”

“Sometimes not just one.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’ve never brought back a group.”

“The guest room’s really not equipped for a three-way.”

“And neither are Nina and Bill?”

It’s true. I’m wild enough already. My parents don’t have a problem with the rotating cast of partners, but they like to think I’m on the way to something stable, something that’ll last. A poly relationship could be this—but they’d never believe it. 

Fortunately, Jake got married years ago and has kids, so the urge for grandchildren has been allayed. Freshly retired and exploring new hobbies (Dad in the kitchen, Mom through adult-school art classes), they just want me to be happy.

Which is another mark in Bekah’s favor. My folks love her. She’s an engineer, of all things.

They worry when I bring home artists. 

“Bekah is lovely,” Mom says when I’m helping with the dishes that night. “I thought she was kind of reserved at first, but she is just great with Owen. You can see she really loves children.”

“Mom.”

“She does! It’s not a comment.”

“I mean, it _is_ a comment.”

“You of all people, splitting hairs!” She swats me with the dish towel and wheels past me to peek out the kitchen door. In the dining room, Bekah is bouncing baby Isabel on her lap. “I just mean she’s a nice girl. Can’t I say that?”

Such a nice girl. The words echo in my mind all night, all week, for months. I’ll remember the night after Christmas when we had dinner and drinks at Florence and Yvette’s place—Bekah doesn’t love the hubbub of bars—and she says maybe a few dozen words the whole time, smiling politely amidst our chatter like she’s woken up in the middle of a dinner party where no one speaks her language. 

I bring a print for their wall. I asked Florence beforehand, of course; it’s a little presumptuous to give someone a piece of art the size of a bathtub, and anyway, Florence likes to know what’s coming her way.

“This was really nice,” Bekah says to me on the walk to the car, her arm snuggled in mine. “You could tell they like your art so much.” She kisses my cheek. 

I left the print leaning against the bookcase in their tiny walk-up apartment. It’ll take up most of that wall once they hang it, and it will look good there. This series is versatile that way: ferns, toadstools, pinecones—even stylized and exaggerated, they’re inoffensively lovely to look at. 

But they don’t mean anything.

I am making it as an artist. I think I can say this now, with some confidence. It could all go to shit, but maybe this is the time to start to take risks again. Maybe it’s time I make art that has something to say.

 _ **She definitely likes you**_ **,** Florence texts later when I ask what she thought. 

**But what do you think about her?** She, the science teacher, was supposed to love Bekah too.

_**I think she really likes you** _

I imagine a lifetime of quiet adoration.

  
  


**December 2019**

There is no way anyone could fail to see that Casey is stunning. I really don’t understand the look my parents give each other when they meet him, or the look Florence gives both of them when she comes to pick us up for dinner. He’s a brilliant, engaging conversationalist, director of development for a worthy nonprofit, and a vision in a perfect suit accented by charmingly mismatched socks. Looking at him, I’m wobbly from the crush of my desire.

“What?” I demand of Florence and Yvette when Casey steps away to use the restroom in the restaurant. “What’s wrong with Casey?”

“Nothing at all,” Yvette says firmly.

Undeterred, Florence declares, “We’ve met him before.”

“You met—” I’m mystified.

Yvette shakes her head in exasperation at Florence. “She means, remember, what’s his name? Zach?”

“And Addison too, now I think of it! That was bugging me; I knew it wasn’t just once.”

“What do you _mean_?” I whisper. Casey’s coming back.

“Mira,” Florence says, voice so kind that the truth hurts less. “You’re looping.”

(Florence has told me it’s how she was born. She gives her parents credit for naming her for a respected ancestor born well over a century ago—a person who’s been dead since before she was born—because no one’s surprised when a Florence turns out practical and old-fashioned. A Florence _might_ be whimsical and romantic. I’ll give you that. But a Florence can easily navigate this world with a fondness for tidy lists and clear objectives. A Florence can collect evidence, analyze, and draw logical conclusions. A Florence, she would say, can make a plan and stick to it.) 

Out at drinks after, with Lisa and Matt, I watch Casey talk with my friends while Christmas pop plays, and it sinks in. It’s true. Affable, bright, easygoing, gorgeous, he gets along beautifully with everyone, and I realize, once again (like with Addison, like with Zach, like with Unique), I’m trying to convince myself I’m in love with someone’s glossy surface because it reflects me so nicely.

“He’s amazing,” I told Florence before I brought him home. “You’re going to love him for me. I know it’s not the first time you’ve heard me say it, but Casey might be the one I’ve been waiting for.”

“Shit,” I say to her now. I toss back a shot and cough. “Sorry.”

“You know you don’t have to bring someone. It’s not a requirement for coming home.”

“It’s not like I bring them _all_! It’s just when I really think we could have a future, you know?” On the speakers, Mariah sings that she doesn’t want a lot for Christmas. The bartender bops along as he shakes someone’s cocktail.

“Is that what you want? A future?”

“Yeah.” Isn’t it obvious? Doesn’t everyone?

Poured from on high, the amber cocktail sluices perfectly downward into the waiting glass. The bartender claps a sprig of mint so that the smell leaps out, drops it onto the surface, and slides the drink down the bar to whoever’s waiting.

“It’s okay if it isn’t.” 

I almost went out of state for college, but then Mom was in the accident. I rescinded my decision. The studio art program is better here anyway—not that that was a consideration in the moment. I just couldn’t be a whole plane ride away.

Florence, of course, remembers a time when I couldn’t bear the weight of more responsibility.

“I didn’t used to. Guess I’m growing up.” 

“Oh, babe.” She signals to the bartender and gets us two more. “You’re going to figure it out.” Her shoulder, warm through its striped sweater, bumps mine. “You’re a treat.”

 _“You’re_ a treat,” I say, and touch shot glasses with her before I drink it down.

Thank god for her. A Florence can send down roots and grow sturdy in the place where she belongs, and who on this glorious earth would dare to fault her for it? 

  


Mom and Dad have lived here long enough that us kids almost know our way around the kitchen. Christmas dinner concluded, Jake’s whipping cream and I’m setting the coffeepot brewing so we can have a cup with dessert. 

“I like what you’re doing,” he says. “This new series.” 

“Not really a series,” I say. It’s been a year of experimentation. I haven’t turned out any kind of collection, just a bunch of disparate pieces that sort of grab at the loose strands of purpose. There’ve been paintings about upheaval and change, a massive mural about mutual aid, textile prints for striking teachers, even a clumsy, humbling foray into sculpting for a piece about solidarity, about unity without homogeneity. Enough of them sold. Meanwhile, a high-end stationery chain commissioned me to produce a line derivative of my old leaf works, so I’m doing okay.

“Okay. It feels like there’s a new voice there. Or not a new voice—just, _your_ voice.”

“Thanks,” I say. I’m hearing this a lot this year—still, it’s good to hear it from my brother, though. Even though he’s certainly not the kind of person who’d look down on me for selling out or doing bland, commercial art, he knows me well enough to know that my art’s been conveying my gaze and my touch without sharing my heart. 

“It makes me happy when I see you’ve updated.”

“A break from the big boats?” Jake’s a web engineer for an international shipping conglomerate. It’s an unglamorous programming job, which is fine with him since it’s also a strict 9-to-5 work culture, with generous family leave and the flexibility to work from home here and there. 

“Ships, we call them. And we mostly deal in ground transport.”

In the other room, I hear little Owen ask about something, then Casey and Dad and Trudy erupt into laughter. Casey’s laugh is rich and welcoming. It ought to warm my heart, that laugh. 

“Hey.” I hand Jake the vanilla. “Do you think—I get that this is a weird question, but do you think maybe I fall in love too fast?”

“Do I think—” He pours in a splash. The dark brown vanishes instantly into the beaters, leaving no visible mark on the frothy white field of cream. He hands back the bottle. “You?”

“Seriously.”

“I’m sorry, but can we clarify? When you say _I_ , you mean _you_ , my sister, Mira Citron.”

Mom rolls into the kitchen right in time to hear Jake really laying into me. 

“Oh hello, yes,” he’s saying, dishtowel tucked into his collar in approximation of the very fetching massive bow that closes my blouse. “Yes, it’s me, your sister, Mira Citron, so I have some news, I’ll just come right out with it because you’ll never guess, I’ve been dating this person for two whirlwind weeks and now am ready to declare, absolutely, with no reservation, that they are my eternal soulmate whom I will love until—”

“Jacob!” my mom says. 

“It’s okay,” I say, because it is. Jake would have stopped if he hadn’t known I was laughing. I’d brought it up after all. 

“What I’m saying is—”

“You’re saying yeah, it’s too fast.”

“And there’s nothing wrong with that,” Mom intercedes. “It’s not just you, darling. It’s just that you have an unusual capacity for requital.”

“What does that mean?”

Mom sets a pie on her lap. “We all want to love. So desperately. We just need to be given an excuse to do it.”

“And I’m full of excuses.”

Still imitating me, Jake piles an invisible mess of hair on his head and says, “Oh, yes, did I mention that I am fascinating and talented and extraordinarily popular, and that I am very good at making people feel good about themselves?”

She swats him, laughing so hard her eyes squinch shut. “And that’s why Mira will always have people lined up to love her.”

The next day, while Casey carefully passes over a sweater I almost forgot to pack, while Casey asks earnestly about my projects on the drive back, while Casey’s eyes linger on me after we kiss goodbye when I drop him off, I think about it.

I think about it while we grind together in the purple strobing light of a club on New Year’s Eve, sparks racing over my skin where our bodies touch. I think about it when we crash into a storeroom crammed with chairs to get in one last fuck, hard and fast and inaudibly loud over the surge of the music on the dance floor, before the countdown begins. I think about it while I’m packed into a friend’s spectacular kitchen, toasting full bottles of champagne in the early hours of the new year, and see Casey wink at me over a dozen other heads, and feel inside, where my pulsing organs ought to be, a beautiful, clean-carved hollow.

He’s great. He loves me.

Being loved, it seems like, is not enough. 

  
  


**Rainbow Sweet Shop, A Long Time Ago**

I met Florence in the middle of my second year of college. I’d been to Rainbow Sweet Shop plenty of times before I got a job there—of course, it had the best ice cream in the college district—but it wasn’t till my sophomore year that I saw a Help Wanted sign in the window below the elegantly lettered words _Rainbow Sweet Shop: You’re a treat!_. My job at the time, at a copy shop where I got scolded and micromanaged by customers and belittled by the lazy boss, commanded little allegiance; I strode in and applied on the spot.

Florence had been there a year at that point—so I’d probably met her when I came in sloppy drunk with a crew of friends and ordered way too much mocha almond fudge (and how _that_ became my drunk order, I truly cannot say, but the heart wants what it wants), but if she remembered me, she was too decorous to say. Instead, she trained me in the art of measuring candy and scooping cones, then set me to work filling orders when the store opened. 

“You’re a trrrreat!” she said to the first customer, handing my very acceptable ice cream cones over the counter with a flourish. The moment the chuckling customer took off, our manager Rosa swept in. 

“You know you don’t have to say that, right, sweetie?” she asked Florence, deeply concerned. “This isn’t the kind of exploitative workplace where anyone’s going to make you parrot a tagline.”

“I’m well aware,” Florence said. It was the first time I noticed the dimple in her cheek. It only shows up with a precious fraction of her smiles. “It’s a choice I like to make.”

Rosa tilted her head, checking for bullshit. Eventually, she seemed to decide to let it go. “Okaaay,” she said. “Also, I’m putting in the candy order tomorrow, so can you check inventory for all the gummies?”

“Already on it,” said Florence, locating a clipboard and handing it over. 

“What would we do without you?”

From behind Rosa’s back, I mouthed “ _You’re_ a treat,” complete with finger-guns, and Florence turned that smile on me.

It turned into a competition between us, to say it to as many customers as we could during our shifts on register without management catching wind of it. Rosa and Pierre are actually excellent. We didn’t want them to feel bad. 

  
  


**December 2020**

The good thing about the video-calls is we’ve figured out how to make them work for us. Why _not_ do what the teenagers were already doing on every bus ride and cafe counter, livestreaming their existence to each other? 

“It feels different, this year, going back.”

“Well, yes.”

“Suck it. I mean, you’ve _seen_ me all year. I’ve seen you.” Not every day, but enough to learn her routines: coffee before the morning jog, another cup or two when she gets back; tea late in the afternoon when she’s done teaching, occasional evening cocktails for herself and Yvette, although I haven’t seen Yvette lately. Her hours at the hospital have been intense. “I’ve practically been your roommate.”

I’ve watched the sunlight slide over the floors of their gleaming new apartment from the kitchen in the mornings to the cream-colored couch in the living room at the end of the day, right before it slips out of the room for the night. She’s there right now, stretching one leg along the cushions of that couch. A Mira Citron print peeks into the corner of the frame. It’s the big one I gave them years ago. Its foliage pops against the rust-colored wall. 

“It’s not like you’ll be filling me in on the new apartment, the news of the town.” She and Yvette gave me a walking tour of the place the first time we video-chatted after the move. It’s a huge step up from their old spot in the college district, where they’d lived since forever. 

I sent them a bunch of plants—at least as much a consolation gift as a housewarming. Florence’s soccer team had just clinched the district championship when the shelter-in-place orders came down; they wouldn’t be able to proceed to state, where they’d placed second last year, let alone regionals. She hadn’t said much about it, but that team lights her up.

So I’d sent some monstera and ficus to add a little color to her new situation.

“I have some news.” She’s looking at her leg, not at me, and the shift in her voice signals something more serious than the conversation thus far.

“For real?”

“We broke up.”

“You broke up?” Florence and Yvette have been together since the year she started teaching. I always liked Yvette fine. 

“We broke up.”

It’s still registering slowly. They’ve been together so long that Yvette has grown into the borders of my mental image of Florence, so that I’ve forgotten how she looks without her around. “You broke up with her? Or? When? Wait, are you okay?”

“A couple months ago, actually. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Months?” Like I said, we’ve been talking all the time. You’d think it would have come up. 

“I didn’t want to talk about it. Still don’t. It was a nice thing, and now it’s done.” She shakes her head, sinking deeper into the stretch. Her toes flex backward toward the crown of her head. “Just—don’t be mad at her.”

“So I should be mad at you?”

That gets her to laugh, and to look up at me. I’m pretty sure she has her laptop on the dining table when our calls are from this angle. “Don’t be mad,” she says, ear hovering above her knee. “We’re growing up.”

I let the moment last, or she does. We watch each other watch each other through our screens. She and Yvette are both tidy, but now it makes sense that the place has been so lifestyle-coach minimal in its furnishings. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Florence keeps it from here on out. If she stays.

“Are you going to be able to keep your apartment?” I ask, too abruptly. “It’s been so great for you. Can you afford—”

“Remember how I finally finished paying off my student loans last year?”

“Oh shit, yeah.” Absolutely I remember; it’s every time a punch in the gut, because Florence is so on her shit, and when oh when will that be me? My erstwhile accountant, Delilah, has told me quite sternly that with a little judicious stewardship of funds, I could be out of the yoke of student debt within a few years. But the thought of judiciously stewarding anything makes my stomach knot and my throat close, so I keep dragging this unwieldy mass of indebtedness behind me on its lengthening track of paid interest.

“So I can actually pay the rent here on my own. I had to cut back my retirement withholdings, but not too bad.”

Managing finances is not even Florence’s job. “You’re a marvel,” I say.

She grins, then hops off the couch. “Okay, gotta lead soccer practice,” she says, approaching the camera to end our call. 

“I thought you weren’t allowed to do any in-person training right now.”

“Well, yeah. Every couple weeks, I’ll mention, ‘Hey, If anyone happens to be running at the Chavez field on Saturday morning, you might see me out there doing some sprints and endurance work. And it’s such a big field, if you wanted to work out in the same place, I don’t see any reason that would be a problem.’ And then we at least get to be around each other a little. The rest of the time, I hold these bullshit online ‘practices’ every week, just doing my best to hold a team together over the internet.” She shrugs. What are you going to do? “See you in a week.”

I’d like to say something more, but there’s nothing she’d want me to say.

I settle for, “Could you use any more plants?”

  
  


**Rainbow Sweet Shop, A Long Time Ago**

As employees go, I was mediocre. I charmed the customers and did great window art whenever Pierre or Rosa asked me to change it up, but I also forgot orders and mixed up instructions and spent altogether too much time daydreaming.

"You lost an ice cream scoop?” I remember Florence asking in absolute bafflement midway through one of my early shifts. “How do you lose an ice cream scoop?" I was deeply apologetic, and waited for her to get annoyed or hold it against me, but it quickly became clear to me that Florence was not here for that. Florence is not the kind of competent coworker who expects everyone to be just like her. 

"You don't need to cover for me," I protested as she bustled off to find some spare scoops in the back storeroom. “I can take the fall! Rake me over the coals, boss. Make me bear the humiliation of my failure!” 

"I'm not covering!” she called back. “I'm just solving a problem."

A few days later, the scoop turned up in the tub of sour worms. (To this day, no one knows where the sour-worms scoop went.) 

  
  


**December 2020**

_**So the person you’re bringing this time—what’s her name?** _

**Rude!**

**_I forgot! Delia?_ **

**Delilah. Close!**

Delilah. A fucking challenge of a lover. We met in March, and I took my time. I got to know her. I can say with no reservation that she gets me, that she cares about me, that she wants me to care about her. There’s no room to doubt when we talk about everything, leaving no element unexamined. This relationship keeps dashing me to the rocks, cracking my shell open wider. 

**She’s just gonna stay for a couple nights. She always does Christmas with her sister**

Usually, the people I’m dating are glad to stay through Christmas. Thrilled, even. Delilah has a tradition of her own—and after much weighing of the possibilities, decided she could come here for a few days so long as we drove separately so she could make it back in time. 

_**You’re not joining her?** _

**I do Christmas here, Florence**

**_Things can change, Mira_ **

I am packing too many gifts to give Flor this year. I’ll make up my mind when I get there. (I’m not actually bringing more plants. That was a joke, and if I start taking my own jokes seriously, no one will trust me anymore.) New art seems uninspired—she has so much of my art. But like she says, things change. My art is changing. I wrap a small figure in newspaper and tuck it in the corner of my suitcase, alongside two heavy scarves in very different styles—a classic plaid, a billowy handknit, both bought from the online version of the local artists’ market. 

Scarves are warm. Warmth is loving. When you’re lonely, you want to feel loved. 

And yet, why should I suspect Florence is lonely? I’ve never known her to be before.

I add some jars of the jam her mom likes, and some wooden bowls and beautifully bound blank books with endpapers marbled in jade and gold. I can’t decide.

_**Not an artist, right?** _

**She’s an accountant**

**_Great_ **

**_Wait, she’s not YOUR accountant, is she?_ **

**Not anymore**

Unaccustomed to getting real money, I wasn’t totally prepared for the sudden influx of attention and funds when the design magazines picked me up last year, so this spring, staring down the amorphous juggernaut of my tax liability, I sought help. 

Delilah is a very good accountant. So good that when I asked her out, she insisted that she square away the year’s taxes first, “Because if I’m going to date you, I’m handing your account over to Javier, and I would like to save him from repeating any of the ten hours of receipt management you and I have slogged through.”

That slog was how I observed her sharpness, her ready instincts, her mathematical brain always spooling numbers. “Whatever it takes,” I said.

  


Delilah goes through the rigmarole, same as all the others: greetings for my folks—my hugs heavier with meaning this year, but after a long breath, just hugs again—a little tour of the place, a moment to get settled before happy hour. Even with the pandemic, it plays out pretty much the same as always. We’ve been quarantining in readiness.

She says nice things about the small but tidy rooms, deposits her suitcase on the bed, hanging a few items in the closet, and touches up her lipstick before we head back out. 

“Was this your room? Growing up?” I see her cataloguing it, setting every bit of my story to rights in her head.

It wasn’t. Except for a series of my old sunscape prints along one wall, it looks like the pleasantly generic guest room it is. “Nah, my folks moved here after I moved out.” 

I’ve told her about this, certainly. I must have explained that after the accident, my parents sold their old Victorian house and bought this newer ranch-style home a few blocks away for its broad hallways and no stairs.

I must have. Right? 

Watching Delilah mentally assay the room, I find myself deeply annoyed. 

The only noteworthy difference from every other time is me. I feel an itching under my skin, a prickling irritation—not at Delilah herself, but at watching yet another person try to figure out how to fit into my life. I’m impatient. I want past this.

“Cool if I head to the kitchen? See you there in a minute?”

“Actually,” she says, like I knew she would, because Delilah would always like just a small thing more, “can you wait just a sec? I’ll be quick.”

I flop backward onto the bed and stare up at the plain plaster of the ceiling. “Sure.”

“If you’d rather not, you can say.”

“No, it’s fine.”

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Florence, asking if we’ve arrived. _**Not that where you are matters to how we interact**_ **,** she writes a second later. _**But still**_

**Yeah, just got in**

**_Great. Glad to have you close again_ **

**I miss you**

I don’t realize till I type it how true it is. Florence is always here when I come home, not _waiting_ for me, but ready. This year, she’s in her new apartment less than a mile from my folks, and I’m here in their guest room, and the distance feels farther than it ever has.

  
  


**21**

I’d been on the verge of asking her out—it was my birthday, and we only had a year left. Well, _I_ did. Florence was already looking into staying around for grad school, getting her teaching certificate. But anyway, it was my 21st birthday, so we were out with a bunch of friends, getting sauced. She came back from the bar with a tray of bright-blue shots—god, the stuff we used to drink—and all together, we knocked them back, toasting me.

Stumbling down the street later, to what would be our final bar of the night, I found her hand in the dark. 

It was a beautiful night, clear and almost cool after the hot day, and her hand was warm in mine. It suddenly struck me, swinging it as we walked, that maybe I should kiss her.

There were a bunch of friends there, though, including a few I’d dated. Might’ve been awkward. Even drunk, I knew that.

So later, over ill-advised last-call lemon drops, while everyone but us was watching Jiayi school Terrell and Lisa at cutthroat, I leaned into her and murmured, “You’re so great.”

She patted my shoulder. “And _you’re_ a treat.” Pulling back, her smile was big enough that the dimple showed. “Slam these?”

We clinked glasses. Shuddering only a little, I kicked mine back.

“Holy fuck, Florence. Hoooooey.” 

“You only turn 21 once, baby.” Even though the teasing was normal, something in her tone of voice caught in my ribs. “Baby,” she’d called me. She’d never said that, not that I’d heard, to anyone. Not to our coworkers at Rainbow. Not to the girlfriends who came to pick her up after work, or to flirt across the ice-cream freezer, their eyes locked to her like the magnet she is. “Most of us, at least. You, I figure you could wind back time if you put your mind to it.”

“Florence.” My mind wound back time. I saw her smiling at me a thousand different times, teasing me for mislaying tools and forgetting orders, using a handful of M&Ms to explain covalent reactions in the only way that ever made sense to me. “You’re so good to me. I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through the last two years without—”

She tilted her head and eyebrows toward the crowd of friends behind us. The point was obvious: I was not without a support squad.

“It’s not the same. They’re— They’re not there for me how you are. Like, I either have casual friends, or I have lovers. Or they’re both at once. No one else has ever cared about me so much without romance getting in the way.”

Leaning toward me over our empty glasses, she listened like I wasn’t drunk and rambling, like she wasn’t drunk and holding her shit together—which is the only way she is ever drunk, in my experience, just consistently, relentlessly competent, demurely circumspect even when she’s on the verge of hurling—and nodded intently. My face, I imagine, was liquid and soft, waiting to lean just a little further so that our lips could meet. It was the right time. She was between girlfriends. I wasn’t seeing anyone seriously.

“I am so glad I can be that for you.” 

Shit. On delay, in my head, I reheard what I’d just said. It was too late to undo it. Even if I’d been sober, it would’ve been tough. How do you say, _Actually, the relationships just got in the way with everyone else; with you, I’m pretty sure we could be friends_ and _kiss._

On the bartop, her hand wrapped around mine. “Call it a birthday present, friend.”

Friend, then. 

It was a firm foundation and also an uncrossable barrier. 

  
  


**December 2020**

Delilah finally decides she’s ready.

(It’s been maybe five minutes. I am being terrible. I am the only person she has shared air with these past two weeks. She has _quarantined_ so that she can meet my parents. She has quarantined _with me_. I can be a little patient.)

The little table in the entry hall is heaped with bags of chocolates. Not cartoony Halloween candy, but fancy holiday sweets in gilded wrappers, the kind that you find kicking around in a forgotten corner months later and that instantly transports you back to December. They’re bagged by generous handfuls, tied in crinkly cellophane bags with ribbons curling down.

“What’s up with the chocolates, Dad?” I pick up a bag to examine it. It’s printed with snowflakes and has a little tag that says _Thank you!_ Its absence triggers a minor avalanche which my arms fail to fully catch. “Oh no!”

“I leave ‘em out front for the delivery people. Little something.”

“What about the delivery person who brought you the chocolate?”

“Gave him ten bucks and a smile,” he says, restacking the mountain of little bags. “Now, Delilah. After that drive, you must be ready for a drink. What’ll it be?”

  


The next day, without our town’s usual entertainments, I suggest to Delilah that we go on a little adventure. Having virtual drinks with Flor later, she asks about it.

“You took her to the falls?” 

“You think I shouldn’t have?”

“It’s kind of an intense hike. Delilah, what’d you think?”

“It was pretty,” Delilah says. “I wouldn’t have minded a paved trail, I’ll admit, and I was expecting something more...impressive? from the way Mira described it. But—”

“You’ve got higher standards than me!” Florence is saying. “I always stop in my tracks that spot where the trail opens out.” Unfortunately, in the video call, there’s no way to subtly tell her to shut the hell up because maybe Delilah doesn’t know she only hiked the first half-mile, not the whole damn thing. “This time of year, it’s got to be pour—” She leans in, perturbed. “Mira, are you okay?”

Damn.

Delilah saw too, definitely, the weird faces I was making into the camera that we’re sharing. Shit. 

“I wouldn’t say we saw anything like a real _falls_ ,” she says, calculating. “More of a picturesque stream.” Casting her dark-lined eyes sideways toward me, she asks, “Have you been gaslighting me, Mira?”

“Gaslighting is a strong term,” I hedge.

“You wanted me to take me to the falls.”

“Yep.” But she kept worrying every time the trail narrowed, afraid she’d lose her step, nervous about the trees creaking in the wind and the mud caking her shoes, and I made up my mind we’d call it at the first cascade. “I guess it seemed like you weren’t really feeling the hiking thing. I didn’t want you to feel bad.”

“You could’ve said.” 

I could have. But then it would have been a discussion, because with Delilah, everything has to be a discussion about what I want and what she wants and how we should compromise so that everyone ends up as happy as possible. I am all discussed out. 

“Yeah, sorry.” 

Delilah’s turning sideways to talk to me, trying to keep Florence out of this—which makes sense, except that Florence has kind of known everything about most of my relationships, and is not likely to be troubled by this evidence that I am once again making imperfect choices.

“Excuse me,” she says to Florence. “I think I’m going to go get some air.”

I ask if she’s okay, and kissing the top of my head benignly, she assures me she is, she just needs a fresh drink and a moment outside. Once she’s outside, I ask, “So, how bad did I fuck up?”

Florence is pouring herself a glass of wine. “I think the more interesting question is _Why?_ ”

“Oh my god. Not you.”

“What?”

“She’s super smart. She’s funny and tenacious. And considerate.”

“These are great qualities in an accountant.”

“Fuck you.” I laugh, forehead in my hand.

“So why, Mira?”

“She...” How do I put it? “She always wants to _understand_ me.”

In gentle mockery, Florence leans forward, resting her chin on her interlaced knuckles, like a sitcom therapist. “Don’t we all.”

“No, but for her, the world fits together like puzzle pieces. She wants to break everything about me down into little analyzable chunks of information so that she can build me back in her head into someone who makes sense, and the fact of the matter is, I think the only way the parts of me make sense is all together.”

“I wouldn’t want you in pieces,” Florence says, raising her glass to the screen. “You’re good how you are, babe. You’re a treat.”

“ _You’re_ a treat.” I sip at my Manhattan.

“But you’ve got to talk to her.”

  


Somehow, all my Decembers have turned into endings.

  


Delilah leaves the next morning. We hug goodbye—I prefer a no-fault break-up. I think about asking if she’d like to be my accountant again, but decide she’s neither ready for that as an actual possibility nor as a joke.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s been great.”

“If anyone’s to blame here,” she says, “it’s me. I’ve always promised myself I wouldn’t date artists.”

She has mentioned this stance quite a few times. “Thanks for giving it a shot.”

“It was a pleasure,” she says. “A complicated detour—but a fun one.”

I ask her to text to let me know when she’s at her sister’s, and then I go inside and take a nap. That was a long, long night of discussions.

  


Christmas is small and strange this year. Just Mom and Dad and me. Jake and Trudy bring the kids by in the afternoon to open gifts under the heat lamp on the patio while the rest of us grin at them from the other side of the sliding glass door.

“I’m locking this,” I warn Dad when I come back in after setting up furniture and presents outside, because if anyone’s going to absentmindedly try to wander out and give some hugs, it’s him.

“So little faith,” he grumbles—but later, sure enough, Jake and I both catch him on the verge of lowering the latch to bring out some cider mugs. 

“Bill!” Mom says, “Mira already got everything ready for them!” Abashed, Dad glowers at the locked door, and beyond it the little patio table with its own mugs and steaming pot of cider, then brings me and Mom the drinks he’s carrying. 

He settles into his recliner and unwraps a chocolate. “Hard to get used to this,” he says.

“It’s just for now,” Trudy says, her voice coming through the phone I set up after I ascertained that these double-paned windows really do a wonderful job stopping sound.

“Now is too long.” 

A few minutes later, Owen unwraps a scooter, and it turns out watching an almost-four-year-old doggedly fall off an unsteady scooter is actually a great time no matter which side of the glass door you’re on.

After they go, we have dinner at a table set with the good china: roasted vegetables and green salad and tamales.

“Florence dropped these off earlier in the week,” Dad says, offering me the plate of tamales. I take one that’s oozing a mouthwatering drip of chile verde. “So nice to see her.”

“You catch up at all?”

“From the sidewalk, but you know, this social distant conversation thing is really a young man’s game.”

“Not a lot, then?”

“My ears aren’t what they used to be. Nina keeps at me to get the hearing checked, but you won’t see me going to the hospital any time soon.”

“So you just make Mom yell at you?”

“We don’t distance in the privacy of our own home.” 

Mom blows Dad a kiss. "Florence has been so careful. You should invite her over while you’re here.”

"Mom!" I throw up my hands in a gesture that is absolutely my mom’s own. _Look at this world_ , it says. _Are you kidding me?_ “I quarantined for fourteen days to be here. You can’t just invite people in!”

"Oh, come on. Are you going to tell me Florence isn't the safest person you know?"

“There aren't _safe people_. That's not how disease works.”

“Are you going to see her at least? While you’re in town?” Dad pours us all another glass of wine. “I know you can’t see everyone you usually do, but it breaks my heart to think you wouldn’t at least see each other.”

"We’re talking every day. I’ll tell her you miss her, okay?"

"Just...” Mom shakes her head. “Go out and see her, honey."

  


It’s a gamble whether Florence will have called a not-really-practice for the day after Christmas, but when I pull up at the Chavez High field, there are at least a dozen kids out there, each spaced an easy five yards down from the next thanks to the football markings. What with the whistling and yelling, she doesn’t hear me approach. 

I watch her for a moment. Her hair curls out from under her hat. Despite the warm layers, her stance is clear: sure, confident, in control.

She’s not so much the kind of person you think is beautiful, even though she is, but more that you come away from thinking, fuck, she could kick my entire ass, and I would love it. 

“Making them work for it.”

She turns, surprised, eyes bright between the knit hat and face mask. “No one’s requiring anyone to be here,” she says. The gold flecks in her earrings sparkle in the early sun.

“Looks like they like it.”

One of the kids closer to us, wearing what looks like an all-over Zaha Hadid print shirt on top of full-body running tights, looks over and does a double-take.

“Oh shit,” she exclaims, loud enough that her teammates hear. “You’re famous.”

“Yes.” I nod, trying not to laugh. “I am a very little bit famous.”

“No, you’re _Mira Citron_.”

I am not that famous. Not name-in-italics famous. Here in my hometown, though, to the right kind of kid—

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Move it, Watkins.” Hearing her coach’s voice, the student shuffles reluctantly back over to her line. To me, pointing, Florence says, “Thirty-yard-line’s free. Get on over.”

“Oh, I’m just here to watch.”

“I’m sorry, babe, you’re what?” Above the mask, her eyes crinkle with a grin, then she yells for everyone’s benefit, “You come out here right now, on my turf, Citron, you’re gonna run.” The theatrical streak is the part of Florence that surprises so many people. Not me. A role brings with it its own freedoms. A retail worker can spout silly catchphrases; a coach can talk tough to her players. I’ve always figured that’s why she stayed in education: A teacher gets better lines than a lab scientist. A way more rewarding audience, too.

I gesture at my stylishly enormous sweater and scuffed boots. “I don’t run.”

Looking me dead in the eye, she blows once on her whistle.

Fine. I run. 

  


“Coach Mejia,” Watkins says a million years later, panting, but less than she ought to be considering the ordeal we have just endured, “I think you broke your friend.”

I am lying facedown on the icy turf, arms stretched long in front of me, legs splayed behind. The cool of the grass might keep my overheated lungs from exploding, my overexcited heart from juicing wildly straight through the skin.

I can hear a whistle, a “Bring it on in!” and Florence saying something that sounds suspiciously like “...tends to get dramatic,” before she starts in on some new drill.

My forehead sinks deeper. I breathe hard, a few times, and am finally able to speak. “I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.” 

“Thank. God.” She keeps talking to the kids, but there’s a thud on the ground near me. 

I sit up to find that it’s a water bottle. This water is the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. When I finally emerge from the depths of my hydration experience, I realize it looks like actually this is the end of practice; these instructions Flor’s giving are something they’re supposed to do on their own. On their distanced lines, stretching weary limbs, the players nod in acquiescence. Plyometric exercises. Sprints. For endurance, three miles every day.

“Every day?!” I interject, horrified.

Raising a hand to forestall my commentary, Flor says, “Unless you’d rather be like Citron here, you have your homework. Really great work today. Check your email for links to this semester’s online practices, and—” drumming on her thighs “—go—”

“—Eagles!” the kids yell. 

“Now skedaddle!” She waves her hands at them. “Get out of here! I never saw you!” 

“Later, Coach!”

“Thanks, Coach. Really cool to meet you, Mira Citron.”

“Coach, I made you cookies. I’m putting them by your bag, okay?”

“Hey, Coach, my dad’s gonna call you about my D in math.”

“That’s fine, Feng, but you and I both know my first question’s going to be, _Has Jenny talked to Ms. Smith about retaking those tests?_ ”

“Maybe I’ll ask him to call next week, actually.”

“Sounds good. You email Ms. Smith today.”

When everyone’s gone, I clamber to my unsteady legs and hobble toward Florence.

“Jesus, Flor.”

“No time in that busy life of yours for exercise.”

“I exercise! I just don’t _run_.”

“Let’s stretch out those legs,” she says. 

Keeping a good distance from each other, we walk over to the red-brown track that rings the field. It sproings jauntily underfoot.

“What are you doing here?”

“Wanted to see you.”

I wanted to see her in her element, with her students. I wanted to see Flor as I rarely get to see her—a champion coach, holding her team together across the distance. 

“You going to keep doing this?”

“So long as I can get away with it. Not really supposed to, but it’s good for them to see each other. To see me. Makes ’em feel like a team, even if it takes us years to build back.”

“Breaking the rules _at school_. Lotta damn nerve.”

“What are they going to do? Fire me? Do you know how hard it is to find a decent science teacher?”

When we get back to our stuff, I’m less stiff. I stretch experimentally and find a strange new ache just about everywhere, but none of me feels like a rubber band on the verge of snapping.

“Hey, before I forget.” I rummage in my bag for a drawing pad and a Sharpie. I scribble the field, with me collapsed face-down at Florence’s feet while soccer kids sprint in the distance. Under it, I write _For Watkins. Fame is fleeting. Run hard._ I sign it with my splashy MC, and set it on Florence’s things. “Get that to Watkins for me?”

Florence has been watching me draw. “She’ll be thrilled. You’re really making a name for yourself, huh?”

“I mean, local girl makes good.”

“Your work is everywhere now. This political stuff. The punk kids at Chavez wear your death dandelion pinned on the back of their hoodies.”

“I love it. ‘Death dandelion.’” I know exactly which piece she means, although that’s not what I’d call it.

“Seriously. You’re a big deal.”

“I thought it would be a flop,” I confess. “I thought it was going to be a grand sacrifice in the name of artistic vision. The fuck of it is this good anticapitalist shit sells better than anything I’ve made before. You get everyone staring at the same four walls, suddenly they’re ready and eager to drop fifty bones on a wall print about human dignity.”

“I like it.”

“You like all my stuff.”

“Because it’s all good. I love your art. You make things people like to look at. But the stuff you’re doing now, I don’t just like to look at it. I like to think about it.”

“Which you didn’t before.”

“Yeah. Like other than _How does she make the ferns look soft and pointy at the same time?_ or _That person looks so familiar. Do I know them?_ ”

“I haven’t given you anything recent.”

“I follow you,” she says like it’s obvious. “That _Whose Climate Changes_ series. It made me cry.”

“You cried,” I say, disbelieving.

She nods in confirmation. “Real tears.”

Hey, I didn’t ask. Are you staying longer this time? Through New Year’s?”

“I think so. No reason to rush back. And we’ve got this perfectly good quarantine going.”

“Except you’re with me.”

“Mom would be serving you dinner in her kitchen if you’d go for it. They trust you implicitly.”

“They know that’s not how risk works, right?”

“That’s what I said!”

“I’m really impressed that you quarantined. That can’t have been easy for you.”

 _Not easy_ barely scratches the surface. But no way I was going to bring my parents disease.

“You’ve been doing it too.”

“Kinda. Only seeing my mom from a distance still. We had dinner outside yesterday.”

“Cold.”

“Kept it quick.”

“It’s been a while then. Since you touched anyone.”

“I’m fine.” Her voice is firm enough that I want to apologize. She doesn’t want to be pried at, and even less does she want to be pitied. She laughs then, a little laugh that seems to warm the air around us. “You busy tomorrow morning? We could go to the reservoir. But tell Nina I’m not ready to breathe on you.”

  


I meet her at the same place where we always park, just off the highway before the road starts to wind as it climbs up into the hills. I give her one of the coffees that I picked up—no contact, no shared air—from the new take-out window at our usual shop. It’s a morning so icy that the steam seems blunted into a meager wisp.

“I can’t decide what to give you for Christmas,” I say. “I brought a lot of things, and none of them are right.”

She steps away to peel away the face mask and test her coffee. “Do you remember anything I’ve ever given you?”

“Sure!” I think back. Starting way back in college, a graphing notebook that I dismayed her by filling with doodles instead of the math I needed to practice; a white button-up shirt because I had some big interview; potholders the winter I had burned my hands on a casserole dish; good pens, and fingerless gloves and, early in the pandemic, a signal-booster so my spotty wifi could sustain our calls. “You know me so well. Everything you get me, I use it to pieces.”

We start to walk toward the reservoir. This spot isn’t really official parking, so there’s a little hill to climb before we get to the path. 

“How are the legs today?”

I may be gasping a little. “Oh, they’re great.”

“I asked about the presents because I just get you the things I think you need. But I don’t think that’s how you choose presents.”

“You don’t _need_ anything.” The way the trees grow here, from the top of the hill, you can only see a little of the reservoir. You have to walk further to get a real picture of what’s going on. “That’s why.”

“Is that right?”

“I get you what I want you to have. Not ’cause you need any of them, ’cause you don’t, but because I want you to have beautiful things you can count on, and comfortable things, and a constant reminder that you are amazing to me, and it’s not always exactly clear to me how to find a thing that does that.”

“Yeah,” she says with laughter in her voice, “that sounds tough.” 

The gravel of the path makes a satisfying crunch underfoot. If there are other people out walking here today, they’re far enough that we can’t hear them. 

“You’re really good at it, though.” It’s been a while since either of us said anything, so it takes me a minute to fit this back with its meaning.

“Well, okay. Fine. Not this time. Here are your choices: let’s see, I have some scarves, or a little sculpture, or fancy kitchen stuff, or—”

“Mira,” she asks. The air is very cold. Above the mask, her eyes shine. “Have you ever been alone?”

I shake my head. I don’t need to think about it. I haven’t. “How long do you mean?” I ask, anyway.

“Long enough to live with it.”

That’s a no for sure. “I don’t live with it. I call someone.” The difference doesn’t need words, but I provide some anyway. “You’re okay. Even by yourself.”

“It’s important to me to know I can be.” 

My mind travels to her telling me, once, that she was glad to be a friend to me—to the alacrity with which she pledged me her friendship.

“In college, did you know I almost asked you out.”

She makes a show of drinking her coffee, then looks studiously out over the water, evading my eyes. The water is glassy today, miniscule ripples wavering silver over its surface.

“You knew,” I accuse her. “You didn’t want me to try.”

With a sigh like a laugh, she turns. “I was nuts about you, Mira.” The words land like smoothed stones in water, slipping in so gently that you might not notice unless you were monitoring the level. “From day one. Always. And you were—in your mind, you were already gone. Out the door. Seeing the world. Seeing—everyone.”

“Everyone,” I concur, thinking back. Every one of them a joy, until they weren’t.

“And I wanted to stay right here. I mean, I work in the same damn city where I grew up. I teach your neighbors’ kids. I wanted, when you moved away, I wanted you to be able to leave without _leaving me_. I didn’t want my heart broken.”

“That’s a cold-blooded approach to love, Mejia.”

“Yep.”

“You’re so fucking pragmatic!” I mean for the words to come out lightly, not in this undignified bark that’s somewhere between a yell and a sob.

“And you are absolutely not.” She reaches toward me as if to take my hand across the broad path, then lets it fall back to her side. “You’ve always wanted to have it all. And that’s not possible.”

Dry, dead leaves rustle in the cold wind. There are thousands of pines behind, full and majestic in their greenery, but these lower, nearer trees catch at my heart. They rustle, they whisper. The browns and yellows of what once was will not just vanish; it stays to make a little more noise before it yields to the bright new growth that is yet to be.

“I want everything. But most of all, I want home to be you.” Like so many things I say, it’s not till I taste these words on my tongue that I know they’re true.

The path winds along the entire perimeter of the reservoir, miles and miles, but we both know where we’ll stop: at the outcropping of rocks on the northern edge where the defanged winter sun will have the most bite. I lie my whole body face-down on the rock to soak up its paltry heat. A few yards away, Florence laughs at me and sits down, leaning back on her elbows so that she can take in the water and the sky all at once. She’s more appropriately attired—she probably has thermal leggings under her jeans, and thick wool socks to warm her toes, whereas I’ve foregone heat for color. The heavy open cardigan hangs most of the way to my knees, but the wind needles through it. I’ll take all the comfort this rock can offer.

“You haven’t been waiting for me.” I’m not sure, as I say this, if it’s an accusation or a question. I’m not sure if I’m tiptoeing up to a reveal, or if the reveal’s been made (minutes, days, years ago?) and I’m just tiptoeing because I’ve grown so accustomed to giving this truth the space it needs to hibernate.

“No, I haven’t been fucking waiting.” She’s laughing. I can’t imagine her swearing otherwise. “My life is not a background story.” (In my story, I can see, it is. I regret this, but such are the shortcomings of the first-person narrative.) “I do what I love. I spent most of the last decade _in_ love. My life is great.”

This shouldn’t feel like a kick in the chest. I’m glad her life is great. Mine is too, isn’t it? “Will it be greater with me in it?”

“You’re already in it, baby. You’ve been in it.”

Okay, then. No more tiptoeing. I flip to my back so that my face, when I say this, won’t be smushed up into a rock. “I want you to be _with_ me. Is that gonna mess things up?”

“I think—” She mulls it over, not like it’s a surprise, but like she is giving me the courtesy of finding her most honest answer. “I think it would be a brighter kind of happiness, being with you.” She sits up taller and looks at me. “And a scarier one.”

“Because I’m an inconstant flibbertigibbet.”

“Well, yeah, obviously. But also, because relationships are so messy. Maybe I don’t like dating you. And then—fuck.” The ground drops away below me, the hollowness in that _fuck_ an abyss. “Then what?” 

“You’d like dating me,” I say even as my stomach continues its plummet. “Everyone likes dating me.”

“And you get tired of everyone.”

I try to imagine anything that could ever, ever make me wish for less of Florence.

“Hey.” I shouldn’t bring it up. She said she didn’t want to go into it. But it feels like, together at least, we’re different people than we were then. “What happened? With you and Yvette?”

“Ah.” Breathing out, she lies down on the rock parallel to me, too far away to reach. A curl of her hair dangles just above the stone. “Hmm. Bold question.”

“You don’t have to say. It’s just, I kinda thought you’d be together forever.”

“Me too.” There’s a long pause, then she says, “Yvette wasn’t on board with the plan. Not a big deal, but then this year. We were both busy. I was stressed about teaching from home, and about the team. With her work, she was—she _is_ surrounded by death and suffering.” Overhead, only the thinnest whispers of clouds dilute the hard blue of the sky. 

“She said it made her feel like she needs to do more with this little time, this little life. Being happy _enough_ wasn’t making her happy enough anymore.”

“Was it enough for you?”

Eyes on the sky, she says, “It was.”

“Were you happy with her?”

“Usually.”

“She was in your _plan_ , though. You must have thought— Did you think she was the one? I thought you were going—”

“Mira,” she says. She rolls to face me. “No. This is where you stop. I can’t explain to you. You want everything. You want perfection. You would never settle for _good enough._ ”

“I want you to have something amazing.”

She laughs. “Is there any way I can convince you that this not-amazing thing I had was actually what I wanted?” 

“Then why aren’t you sadder?”

“That’s part of why I liked it. If— if you and I dated, Mira, and _we_ ended it, I would be sadder.”

“And that’s why you don’t want to—”

“You said you want me to have beauty and constancy and comfort. You can’t give them to me in a thing any more, because the things have hit their carrying capacity. To give more, it has to be in you. 

“I believe you respect me. I believe you care about me. So I ask you, Mira, my incredible, perfect, flibbertigibbet friend: Are you able to give this?”

I would like to say yes—but first, I know she’ll know it’s bullshit, and second, I know I know it’s bullshit. It’s wanting, not being. 

“Not yet.”

The flash in her eyes. I can’t tell if it’s disappointment or satisfaction.

“Good for you,” she says.

“What are you, my dad?”

I stand and look down at her, practically dressed in a way that obscures her round, strong arms, her arched throat, her sudden smile. I am trying not to look at her differently, trying not to let my brain turn her into an object of desire. It’s probably too late to stop it.

“Give me some time. To get used to me, alone, without you. To live with myself.” I’m bargaining, and I don’t know what I have to offer here, but it seems like maybe this is something. It’s something she wants for me—from me?—that much I know. I can work from this.

“What do I do, while I’m giving you time?”

“Wait for me, mostly.” She’ll know it’s a joke.

“Eat rocks.”

“No, I don’t know! I’m not gonna tell you what to do. You live your life how you want. No strings, no limitations. I try a crash course in self-improvement via loneliness or whatever, and I report out, and you fall in love with me or you don’t, whichever you want.”

She nods, hesitates, laughs. Shaking her head in rejection of some unspoken idea, she starts to talk, and hesitates again. When she finally gets the words out, they’re quiet but unmistakable: “I do not have any control over whether I fall in love with you, Mira.”

“You said—”

“What I _do_ with that knowledge, well.” A white ribbon of breath huffs out. “I have some strategies.”

“Fuck. What are you doing to me?”

She stands, dusting her pants. “Let’s get out of here. Promised Bill I’d have you home for lunch.”

“What— _what?_ After what you just said? We’re not leaving here without—”

“What _you_ do with that knowledge,” she says, smiling back at me like it’s normal. “That’s your business.”

  
  


**New Year’s Eve 2020**

I can do this. I will do this.

I help with deferred house projects and bake with Dad and sketch with Mom, whose art classes are all online now. “It’s not as fun without the live nudes,” she comments when I ask her about the classes over coffee one morning, and Dad and I barely avert double spit-takes.

We pack up her van with easels and sketchpads and drive off to the main entrance of the reservoir. For a surprise, I texted Jake, and so midway through our first drawings, a dad and some children show up to populate the scene—Owen zipping around the big concrete plateau of the vista point on a little scooter, and Isabel doing her valiant best to catch him. With a thick smudge of charcoal, I capture her sturdy toddler legs, her outstretched hands. 

“I’m so glad you pursued this,” Mom says. 

“Art?”

“I wanted to, you know. But I needed to make a living.”

“You could’ve—”

“It’s not in me the way it’s in you.” She holds out her charcoal to the horizon, eyeing a line. “I wouldn’t have toughed it out for all those years of eighty-hour workweeks like you did.”

“Mom.”

“Thank you for sharing this with me.”

I don’t know what to say. I turn the page of my sketchbook and draw her, one hand anchoring her to the wheelchair so that she can angle to peer around her easel at her son and grandchildren frolicking beyond. I only hint at what’s past them—the clear water, the trees. Her eyes are my focus. They’re bright and intent. They take in what is and what is not and what still could be.

“It’s too bad you can’t spend much time with your friends this visit.”

“As ‘too bad’ goes—”

“I know,” she says, with familiar loving exasperation/ “I’m not saying it’s the end of the world. It’s okay to miss it. _I_ miss seeing them.”

I fill her in. Matt and Lisa are expecting a baby in April; Terrell got a job in Spain and is already there, self-quarantining in an apartment that’s hundreds of years old; Eva’s in pediatric residency but feels drawn to gerontology.

“What about Florence? She’s been so kind to drop things off this year, every month or two stopping by and saying hi.”

“Florence is good.”

“You said she and Yvette broke up.”

“That kind of year, huh?”

Owen shoots toward us, Jake trotting fast behind him to keep him from getting too close. Behind _him_ , Isabel falls hard, looks around for a reaction, and getting none, scrambles back to her feet and runs to take her dad’s hand. 

“We’ve got to get home for lunch and nap,” Jake says. “Thanks for inviting us!”

Mom pretends to hug the children across the space between them, getting a little paint on her sleeve in the process. Once they’ve ambled off, I tell her I have some tricks for getting that out.

“I don’t know if I’ve told you, Mira, but when you were born—with Jake, it was an unusual first birth, they said, so fast and smooth. Didn’t _feel_ smooth. But when you came, you know, Marybeth Walters down the block who was supposed to be watching Jake had just that very day fallen off the kitchen stool and broken her hip, so your father dropped me off at the hospital, then was driving around trying to find someone who could watch your brother in the middle of the night, and meanwhile I was in labor that felt nothing like anything I remembered from the first time around. 

“I don’t remember the pain now. That vanishes. But I remember, in there, clear like crystal, that I reached a time of bargaining. ‘ _God_ ,’ I said, ‘or _Universe_ or _philosophy_ or I don’t know what, you get this child out of me, and I promise I will figure out how to do right by her.’

“You may not know, but newborns don’t smile. When they put you on my chest, you closed your eyes and smiled. I was won. 

“It was an omen, maybe. You have what they call a winning personality. What does that mean? Charm, and wit, but it’s more than that. It’s an attitude that you’re going to figure things out—not _or die trying_ , just that you’re gonna make it.”

“I think you figured it out, Mom. I’ve been done right by.”

  


“Sorry we can’t offer a more exciting New Year’s, Mira,” Dad says. I helped him put together an elaborate dinner to mark the end of the year—cress soup and citrus-fennel salad, mussels and flatbreads and cassoulet, crème brûlée, champagne. Now the three of us are drinking tea, and the two of them are yawning.

Mom shakes her head. “Midnight’s going to come whether we’re awake or not.”

“...and we won’t be,” Dad concludes brightly. “What will _you_ do?”

“I don’t know. Watch a show? There’s a video-chat at 10, so I’ll probably drop in on that for a while.”

I wish them a good night, then linger over setting the kitchen to rights. Jake has given them a calendar with photos of the kids for every month. It’s already hanging open to January, where a very bundled Isabel lies, amazed into stillness, in a field of snow.

I start to flip through, figuring I’ll miss most of the months, and then Dad meanders back into the room. “Forgot to start soaking the beans for tomorrow.”

He pulls down a jar of black-eyed peas and pours them into a pot. They swish out to cover the enamel bottom. Covering them with water and a lid, he sets them on the back of the stove.

“I could start ’em in the morning, but they’re better this way.” He sees the calendar in my hands, and chuckles. “Look at Owen with that shovel.”

“Dad, what if I was here more next year?”

“I’d love it.” He slings an arm over my shoulders. “We both would. You’d have to eat a lot of the experiments, not just the good stuff.”

“Okay.” I give him a hug back. “Good night, Dad. Happy new year.”

  


The video chat is a cheerful catching-up, but no one has that much to catch us up on, really. There’s family drama, and babies, and the distant prospect of vacations and parties “once all this is over,” and it’s hard for me to give it my warmest attention. I work my way through a few drinks, trying hard not to just look at Florence like the weak-willed lover I am. 

She steps off-screen, which helps. I listen more attentively to the details of Terrell’s work at the international newsdesk, but thanks to the time difference, it’s already morning there, and he is very drunk and almost asleep.

My phone dings. 

_**Want to get out of here?** _

I wasn’t expecting it, but of course my answer is yes. **Where?**

**_The bar_ **

**It’s gotta be closed**

**_It is. Meet you in front in 20_ **

The street’s deserted. Who would come out on a night like this, drizzling and desolate, to a business district devoid of business, where the only sounds come from TVs and chatter in the apartments above?

On the bench in front of the bar, under the kind of huge umbrella soccer coaches sometimes use—oh, that checks out—she’s waving at me as I walk up. 

She scooches over, indicating that I should join her on the bench. I almost do, then hesitate.

“My parents—I feel like I should make sure. I’ve been quarantining, you know, since the tenth. Just Delilah and my folks. And I guess I was at your practice.”

“Same,” she says. “I’m willing to brave it if you are.”

So I sit beside her, under her umbrella that easily shelters two.

“Beer?” She hands me one, levering off the cap as she does so. 

“Cheers.” I have never felt so naked as in that moment, unhooking one loop of my face mask so that I can drink on the street in a deserted row of shops a single foot away from a person who has brought me more happiness than anyone else I know, and whose closeness suddenly, newly, as a person I might actually get to _kiss_ , makes my entire center vibrate.

“No, wait, that’s a chaser.”

“This your usual New Year’s Eve?”

“Nah, we mix it up.” She pulls out two shot glasses and a flask. “A new year,” she says. “A change.”

“God, I hope so,” I say, lifting the glass she handed me. 

The shot turns the night deeper and brighter. On the wet dark street in front of us, the streetlights change for almost no cars. 

“I thought you’d never—”

“It’s been four days, Mira.” She is laughing at me, and I love it. I love it so much, being laughed at by her, having her see my foibles and find them wonderful.

“How is that different from forever?”

My hand, making its way back down, finds Florence’s waiting. 

My awareness of time’s progression warps. As I turn my head to look at her to deduce what on earth she has in mind as she takes my hand, I am not traveling forward, but sideways, through this moment’s obsidian depths.

Her eyes glisten. They are on mine; it looks like they’re waiting for me to decide. 

“I could be way off base here, but are you trying to kiss me?”

“If you’d like.”

There is nothing I’d like more, so I go in to kiss her, then stop myself, almost there but not quite. I am the inconstant lover, the demander of the impossible. I am not the one who should set the terms here.

I’m near enough to feel the heat in the air between us. Her eyes, unembellished, sparkle. 

Then, feeling somehow like the definition of _round_ must feel, whole and bountiful, her lips touch mine. It’s quick and light and over before I can sink into it—and as soon, she’s kissing me again, and this time, I’m ready. Where she is steady and warm, I am jagged heat and unfettered yearning, and she meets me and I meet her, and both of us gasp with it as we discover how much we are prepared to give.

When she finally pulls back, her hands curve around my face, one brushing against the face mask that dangles from my left ear. I’m a mess. I should have taken it off all the way—but it’s so much more convenient to let it hang, so much harder to lose when it’s still right there like ungainly jewelry. 

Her hands are on my face. 

My mouth tastes like her.

The umbrella, let go, has tilted, and light rain dusts our exposed skin.

Florence Mejia, love of my life, is here, and kissed me, and is holding me, and what does this mean? 

“You said—said I needed to be on my own.”

“Yeah.”

“You changed your mind.”

“No.” Her dimple is particularly pronounced in this indirect light. ”This isn’t much. We could still walk it back. You’re going to need to give it time. I just think it’s fair to know what it is you’re waiting for.”

“Like I don’t know. Like I wouldn’t wait for you, Florence. You’re—”

“—a treat,” she finishes for me, thumb sliding over my lower lip. “I know.”

“No—yeah, but.” Grabbing loosely for comprehensible thought, I pause to kiss her thumb. “You’re so solid. In every single way, you’ve got your shit together.”

“Or I’m just a coward.”

“Fuck right off. You’ve always been out ahead of me, but—but maybe you could be ahead _with_ me. If I play it right, maybe you’re my future.”

 _My future_. She mouths it with me, and even though part of her’s obviously unimpressed ( _how_ many times does she have to hear these words from me?) she’s also working hard to contain some emotion too unruly to permit free rein. 

“So you’ll try.”

“Oh my god. Flor. I’m trying already.”

“You go home tomorrow?”

I nod. She glances at her watch. (Multi-function, waterproof, doing fine even in this rain.) 

“Still 2020?” I ask.

“Yeah.” She kisses me again to lock it in. “Starting now, I’m officially waiting for you. Call me next year.”


End file.
